Whole chickens are on sale again, which I love, because I can buy a couple and break them down into individual meal portions and stash them in the freezer for much less than it would cost to buy them already cut-up. I got super spoiled with all the cheap chicken at Win-Co back home. Actually, Americans spend less of their disposable income on food than any other industrialized country, and we spend less now than we did in the past. The average American spent about 10% of their income on food in 2006, compared to 25% in 1933. Yes, thanks to Agrobusiness, we eat very cheap food. I won’t go into all the theories on how this negatively affects our health. My point is, after 8 months I still suffer from sticker shock every time I go to the grocery store, and I’ve promised myself I will do everything in my power to stretch our Pound. So if I can buy a chicken for $1.57 per pound, I will do it. And I will spend 30 minutes hacking skillfully carving it into smaller pieces, boiling the bones for stock and freezing what we can’t eat right now.

au natural

The one weird thing about chickens here is they don’t cut the legs in the same place as they do in America. In the US, the feet are removed at the knee joint, as seen in this photo right below the woman’s hand. Doing this removes the “inedible” feet and all the scaly skin with it. Well here they don’t bother with precision like that. They actually cut though the bone instead, leaving about 1-1 1/2 inches of scaly foot (ankle?) on the bird. Which is kinda gross. If you’ve never before touched scaly chicken foot-skin, don’t. If I plan on roasting it later I don’t bother removing this section, I just cook the whole thing and then toss it afterwards. But I just read somewhere that chicken feet supposedly make the tastiest stock, and since I’m being thrifty that means I must do certain things. So today I took my trusty kitchen shears and set about removing this unsightly bit of bones. I wrapped my hand around the scaly skin. I cut strategically. About halfway through the process I snipped a tight tendon to get the bones apart, and I immediately had the realization that I had essentially just cut the chicken version of the ACL. One of my roommates in Boston snapped her ACL playing frisbee while I was there, and it was awful. I felt bad for the chicken. But then I remembered he was dead. We’re eating him tomorrow.